Lanzones

It's the height of lanzones season now, and the festival celebrating what's known to be the sweetest variety - grown in Camiguin, a small, enchanted volcanic island in Northeastern Mindanao - is just wrapping up. 

In Luzon the preferred variety comes from Laguna, and it's the selling point of vendors - matamis yan, galing sa Laguna yan - much like another vendor would say his mangoes came from Pangasinan, or his bangus from Dagupan, etc., to score more sales. 

Laguna lanzones is indeed sweet, but it'd be sour placed side by side with Camiguin. 

the black ants that rode in an A320

They say black ants ants crawling all over are a sure sign of sweetness, but then enterprising vendors have been reported to catch colonies of black ants to drop them over their carts of lanzones. 

What I have been seeing these past few weeks are big globules of fruit, and for me that's a sure sign of big, fat seeds that taste bitter. So I haven't been buying. Though I have an officemate from Laguna who brings bunches of lanzones from their backyard trees after weekends, and I make sure to get some. They're big, but they're sure to be sweet. 

In Mindanao, though, and I mean all over the island and not just in Camiguin, the medium-sized lanzones are so sweet they are a threat to Pangasinan mangoes. So, so sweet, it's almost not a lanzones. The segments are all juice and flesh, and that one seed in one segment is so little it's almost non-existent. Just pop and pop, no need to spit out a pesky seed, it's easy to swallow, no worries about a large lanzones tree developing in your nether regions.

But it's a sweet lanzones year. Even Luzon lanzones are satisfactorily sweet. Which is probably why the price has been steadily in the Php80-100 range with no sign of going down. Just pick out the small ones.

Related Posts
Bagong Lipunan Restaurant
CDO Ham
Pastel